Here are some of the new pics we are adding with our next update. As you may know my “market research” is entirely based on observing my daughter’s interactions and she recently began leading me to look at things. Just to look at them. This kind of spontaneous sharing was miraculous and probably a lot to do with the iPhone videos we take of her preferred activities and entertainments.

So I decided I wanted to add a spontaneous comment sentence maker. My other research was based on what my friends told me their TYPICAL kids use to bring their attention to something.

This is for prompting Shared Attention.

When you are lucky enough to reach this stage in the natural environment (not a desktop discreet trial) where the Child is pointing out something, purely for the pleasure of sharing with you, they may be doing a single word or else incorrectly using the “I Want” card when what they really mean is “Hey, Look at that”
The reason I surveyed parents of typical toddlers is because I wanted it to be a naturally occurring phrase. Sure, we teach “What do you See?” at the desktop in discrete trials;
but have you ever heard anyone outside of an Language For Foreigners Program say:

“I See The Brown Dog” ?

Nope, little kids who are developing language at a normal rate will point and say “look” when they notice something.
To teach it – get down from the desk and put on a video or DVD of their favourite show. Grab the remote and pause it whenever the child is particularly excited about a character.

Say “What/Who’s that?” and point at the character, then prompt them with the “Look!” and then a saved photo of the character which you downloaded and saved from google images using wifi on an iPhone or iPod/iPad, in preparation for the exercise.

So if you are watching Barney and the little girl dinosaur comes on (Grace loves her) you pause and say “Who’s that?”

Then prompt with the phone: “Look” and “BabyBop”and then follow that up with lots of cuddles and smiles. The sharing of the favourite should be reinforcing enough, but offer a tangible reinforcer if you need to make it more engaging.

You can try this somewhere like a Zoo, Aquarium or Open Farm – but you have less instructional control over those damn penguins who might rack off into their pond before you get a chance to prompt the sharing.

One response to “Look At That, It’s Update Time”

I downloaded the app to our new iPad for my 4 1/2 year old PDD-NOS son. He has some verbal communication but uses PECS for some of his communications. He understood how to use the app almost immediately when I added his PECS cards to the app.

A few questions and suggestions:1. can you change the picture on the main screen that is created when we add our own pictures? It looks like it took the third picture I selected, and it isn't one of the ones he uses a lot.2. can we reorder the pictures? Not knowing how it was going to load, I didn't pay attention to selecting the pictures, so his top 5 (I want, please, Thomas, Lunch Meat, Water) are spread all over the place and on different pages3. The selection of external pictures allows you to add duplicates. Deleting them causes the application to crash4. He learned PECS where when he is done building the sentence strip, in touches each card and says the work/phrase. In Grace, touching the cards in the sentence strip removes them which is causing frustration for him. I'd like to see an option to use double touch to remove instead of single.